"What are you thinking about?" my husband asked me as I stared grumpily at our print of the Virgin of the Green Cushion.
"There's a discussion of public breastfeeding [hat tip: TiaKay] that's bugging me. I'm tired of talk about public breastfeeding."
"You love to talk about public breastfeeding," he said.
"No, I've said what I have to say: I'm right. Get over it." (Yes, I am a Repository Of Amazing Charity and Humility; no need to dwell on the unfortunate acronym.)
I posted at length last summer about breastfeeding in public after I was told on public transit that my behavior was offensive. What I said there is most of what I have to say: to oppose public breastfeeding is to oppose improved public health. But what troubles me about the discussions at Open Book is the people who are couching their opposition to public breastfeeding in Christian terms, saying that nursing a baby with others around is an offense against modesty. And that makes me want to say, Go soak your head. In curdled formula. (A font -- nay, a geyser -- of charity I am.)
But really: how can you believe that a good and wise God has fashioned women's bodies and yet want to make breastfeeding more difficult? Who put the lipase in human milk? Who planned the whey-casein ratio? Those things make human milk extraordinarily digestible, and as a consequence human babies need to nurse frequently. God could have made women to be like rabbits, who nurse their kittens once a day. (Some mothers might have preferred this arrangement.) But he did not. If babies are to receive the food their Creator designed for them (you know that JP2 encouraged mothers to breastfeed, right?), we as a society have to get more comfortable with public breastfeeding.
Some of the Open Book commenters were talking about discomfort with public nursing as if it were a universal happening: men everywhere have always found women's breasts sexually appealing, and so good women have known to nurse in private. To which I say: Bunk. Anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler has studied this question; she reports that breast stimulation during sex is a minority sexual behavior among the world's peoples. Strictures against public breastfeeding are chiefly a twentieth-century Western idea. A bad twentieth-century Western idea -- one to be discarded, not defended.
I have been reading Lauren Winner's Real Sex, in which she talks about the need for Christians to recognize the ways that the culture has wrongly ordered their thinking. Sex is her primary example, of course; she offers consumerism as another. I submit that breastfeeding is a third. Squeamishness about breastfeeding smacks of Gnosticism and puritanism, not to mention reprehensible formula company advertising. It has no place among a people who celebrate their redemption through the Incarnation.
Amy Welborn asked why women got emotional about breastfeeding. I have posted before about what nursing my children means to me, but there is an incarnational component I have not often touched on. I want to live a life in which I rise up in the morning thankful for eyes to see with and feet to plant on the floor beneath me, and lay me down at night grateful for a body that grows weary and for sleep to refresh it. And all through the day I will nurse my baby with a glad heart, offering this living fluid to the children I am called to serve, in service to the One who offers me living water. The Lord who did not spurn a human frame did not spurn his mother's breast, and breastfeeding has been transformed by the Incarnation along with the whole created world. Breastfeeding is something good and right and normal, not something to be hidden in the cry room with the tantruming toddlers.
Through the Open Book debate I found Genevieve Kineke's blog (she is (or was?) the editor of Canticle magazine), in which she argues that women ought to cover themselves with a blanket if they nurse in public. I don't buy that, personally. Some of it is contextual, because I am writing in June and I get hot enough, nursing a sweaty baby while two of his sweaty older brothers jockey for position on either side of me, without adding a blanket to the mix. But most of it is a year-round point of view: a draped blanket, in my view, proclaims: "Attention, please! This baby is nursing! And his mother is not terribly comfortable doing it in public!" Since many people ill at ease with public breastfeeding seem to object to the idea of a nursing baby as much as to the visual of a nursing baby, I don't think draping a blanket addresses the real problem.
Let me say clearly that I am not advocating deliberate indiscretion -- I'm not sitting topless in my pew giving glory to God for the beauty of breasts. In fact I doubt you'd notice Pete nursing if you sat next to us in Mass. Occasionally, though, a piece of clothing slips or a baby arches away unexpectedly (I am a geyser of things other than charity), and it may take a second for a mother to rehab her deshabille. Briefly awkward? Perhaps. Erotic? Surely not. I remain bothered by the Open Book commenter who seemed to say that any glimpse of a woman's breast in any context was a lure unto the infernal lake of fire. That sounds like something for you and your confessor to work on, buddy, and not so much the mothers with hungry babies.
I dimly remember feeling awkward about nursing; one of my best friends had her first baby a few months before my oldest was born and during my first visit to see the baby her top stayed hiked up over her nipple after the baby had finished. I remember puzzling over what to say. I knew how to let her know if her zipper was open, or to hand her a tissue if something was hanging out of her nose, but her nipple! was staring out of her shirt! with baby spit on it! What to do?!
I can tell you this: awkward feelings about breastfeeding diminish with exposure to breastfeeding. For the sake of American babies as well as the children and adults they will become (did you know that a mere 13 weeks of breastfeeding protects children against gastroenteritis for the succeeding seven years? or that breastfeeding protects baby girls against breast cancer in adulthood?), we cannot expect their mothers to hide, or be embarrassed, or pump before outings, or supplement with formula, in order to sustain an outdated notion of decorum. (Please, if you disagree with that contention, do not even begin to compare breastfeeding with defecation. No breastfeeding advocate anywhere is proposing public defecation. We are only saying that if a baby can be there, if a baby can have a bottle there, a baby should be able to breastfeed there. The suggestion that breastfeeding activists are secretly yearning to have sex or urinate or move their bowels in public impels me toward yet another sort of geyserhood.)
I am curious: are there any men out there? This blog is coming up on its thousandth comment and I think two of them have been from men. Say hi, guys, and tell me what you think about nursing in public. Is a lactating breast an erotic sight? Does it leave you feeling uncomfortable? Did your perspective change after you had children, if you have them? The idea that public nursing could really provide someone with a sexual charge is very strange to me, but I admit that I can only see from where I'm standing.
Last week I left a comment at Linda's about sleazy music in girls' dance classes. I linked to the lyrics of a song that I heard twice five years ago but that seems to be inked into my brain like a bad tattoo. For days now I have been chanting it in my head, at one point picking Pete up to sing to him and finding "Sweat, baby, sweat, baby, sex is a Texas drought" at the tip of my tongue. I snapped my jaw shut and heaped imprecations on the head of the man who wrote those lyrics. (And may I point out that mammals do not have a monopoly on copulation? Wouldn't it have been more accurate to say, "You and me, baby, ain't nothing but chordates, so let's see how the sex is and then maybe have more dates"? Hold on, hold on -- I think I hear a music industry exec beating a path to my door--)
--Anyway, Christians agree that we must reject the thinking behind a song like that one. (When I catch myself thinking the chorus I try to revise it appropriately: "You and me, baby, are mammals with immortal souls, so let's do it with our spouses as an implicit renewal of our marriage covenant." The scansion, I know -- I'll keep at it.) Of course we are more than mammals.
But let us also reject, with equal vigor, the opposing error -- the Gnostic fallacy that our bodies are evil and that we deal best with their difficulties by shoving them aside out of sight. Let us rejoice in the truth: that our bodies have been redeemed and our desires can be rightly ordered. Yes, breasts have been sexualized in this culture. So let's change the culture.
Biology dictates that nursing infants will nurse often. Charity dictates, in my view, that those of us commanded to "suffer the little children..." respond graciously when their mothers strive to meet their most basic needs.
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